So if you look at the section of Apple’s “Swift tour” discussing “simple values,” you’ll find a short code example assigning occupations to different variables — Malcolm is a captain, Kaylee is a mechanic, and Jayne is in public relations.

Now if you’re the right kind of nerd, you probably recognized those names immediately as characters from the much-loved TV show Firefly, created by Joss Whedon and aired ever-so-briefly on Fox more than a decade ago. Malcolm is indeed the show’s captain, Kaylee the mechanic, and the bit about Jayne is a joke about a joke.

Part of the reason this tickles me is the occasional, usually hidden, influence that a show that lasted for less than one season (it was briefly revived as a film) still seems to exert in the tech world. Most notably, it was widely believed to be the inspiration for the naming of Google Wave (hey, remember Google Wave?), and apparently the whole Wave development process involved lots of references to Firefly and other Whedon-related works.

OverviewFireFly is a photo check-in service for Twitter. Users are able to share their locations and experiences by checking in with photos and places via a smartphone application, as well as see the real-time locations of their friends based on their Twitter activities. The service is built to run on top of Twitter and work with users’ existing Twitter social graphs.
FireFly differs from other check-in …